He was walking across the lawn toward the landing stage on the
river, and still felt all around him, under the dome of golden
evening, an Old World savor and reverberation in that riverhaunted
garden. The next square of turf which he crossed seemed at first
sight quite deserted, till he saw in the twilight of trees in one
corner of it a hammock and in the hammock a man, reading a newspaper
and swinging one leg over the edge of the net.
Him also he hailed by name, and the man slipped to the ground and
strolled forward. It seemed fated that he should feel something of
the past in the accidents of that place, for the figure might well
have been an early-Victorian ghost revisiting the ghosts of the
croquet hoops and mallets. It was the figure of an elderly man with
long whiskers that looked almost fantastic, and a quaint and careful
cut of collar and cravat. Having been a fashionable dandy forty
years ago, he had managed to preserve the dandyism while ignoring
the fashions. A white top-hat lay beside the Morning Post in the
hammock behind him. This was the Duke of Westmoreland, the relic of
a family really some centuries old; and the antiquity was not
heraldry but history. Nobody knew better than Fisher how rare such
noblemen are in fact, and how numerous in fiction.
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